Design of surgical robot slave manipulators has recently been moving toward more compact devices, and also away from general purpose robots in favor of systems designed and built with one particular surgical access route or type of surgical procedure in mind. There has also been a trend toward using continuously flexible robots (i.e., “continuum robots”) to enhance dexterity inside the patient in small-diameter packages. The requirements of the surgical environment (sterility, ease of use, safety, compactness, etc.) also place stringent design requirements on continuum robot actuation systems.
Endonasal surgical procedures provide a non-invasive approach to addressing the high incidence of disease in the pituitary region of the brain. For example, pituitary tumors account for 15-20% of all primary brain tumors. Conventional transfacial and transcranial surgical procedures offer highly invasive, yet effective, approaches to treating this disease. Treating pituitary tumors using a less invasive endonasal approach can be desirable. This approach, however, can be difficult for a surgeon to execute by hand, due to the confined spaces and the lack of dexterity in current rigid surgical tools, which lack wrists, joints, or other means of controllable deflection. For example, one challenge that can be difficult to overcome with manually operated, rigid endonasal surgical tools is the initial drilling away of bone to enlarge the nasal passage and expose the surgical site, which can be necessary in certain instances.